Paper short abstract:

This paper explores refugee/host community environmental knowledges, values and practices in Uganda, in order to better understand the political-economic dynamics and interrelationship between livelihood practices/sustainability and environmental degradation in protracted refugee contexts.

Paper long abstract:

Uganda has the largest refugee population in Africa, and the third largest in the world. In need of access to scarce natural resources such as water, food and forest products, refugee populations have - alongside host communities - contributed to environmental degradation in Uganda. The country has lost more than one million hectares of forest in the last ten years, threatening biodiversity, livelihoods, and straining refugee-host relations. Yet the interrelationship between forced migrants’ use of natural resources, environmental degradation and livelihood sustainability in rural contexts is not well understood. This paper addresses this gap by combining household surveys, in-depth interviews and participatory mapping to explore situated refugee/host environmental knowledges, values and practices in two different refugee settlements in Uganda. Incorporating a sustainable livelihoods framing with a political ecology perspective, the paper ‘unsettles’ dominant narratives of refugees as environmental threats, exploring how (contested) knowledges and values shape society-nature interactions amongst those living in and around refugee settlements. Given Uganda’s increasingly neoliberal approach to refugee development and self-reliance, the paper also considers the differential impacts on livelihoods and access to natural resources amongst individuals, highlighting broader political-economic structural processes which undermine livelihood efforts, affect household decision-making processes, and drive environmental change and injustice. These insights will help guide the design of humanitarian and development policy in protracted refugee situations, facilitating the development of sustainable livelihoods and working towards more equitable and ecologically healthy environmental futures for refugees and host communities alike.